Paper as Art: logistics and more ideas

A loyal reader (okay, it's my mom) went out and bought some hand-made paper to hang in her vacation house in Arizona, but wanted to know how, exactly, I handled the framing of mine, in my dining room. Oh, details.

I bought these Ikea Ribba frames for $25 a piece. They happen to be the perfect size and proportion for the large-scale paper I bought.

I took the backs off the frames and put the mattes, front side up, on a large surface. I centered the paper ON TOP of the mattes to float them--losing the uneven edges would lose the hand-made quality to the paper, which would be a shame.

I attached the paper with double-sided tape at the four corners and in the middle of each side. The paper is uneven and doesn't lie 100% flat, but I liked the slight rippled effect and just used small pieces of tape so I wouldn't fight the natural edge.

When you go to put the frames back together, two things to note:

-- the plexi has a thin coating, kind of like saran wrap, on BOTH sides. You can pull it up from a corner, but you definitely need to remove both sides.

-- these frames are cheap for a reason. There are teeny tiny little screws that come with the wire kit, and you MUST use these in the little metal brackets on each side of the frame. Otherwise, when you go to hang them, the plexi will pop out of the frame. No good.

Want some more ideas? Here are some other paper options.


This type is smaller, comes in many colors this red was my favorite, but the peacock blue was not far behind), and I love the very fine quality of the line. I would use this somewhere more intimate, a smaller space like a bathroom, and frame just one of them in gold with black mattes. A single one would feel like something special brought back from a trip overseas.


These gold chrysanthemums would have strength in numbers. Like, six of them in a grid. The pattern and the line is very delicate, and because it repeats (unlike the red one, which has a centered motif), the more, the better. Frames could be natural, gold bamboo, or a Chinese red lacquer, depending on the decor. I would do these in a big hallway.



Finally, this sculptural white one might be my favorite. In fact, I find myself tempted to go back and get it! I would do this in a white shadowbox frame with an ivory linen matte, with the paper floating inside the matte. It would be gorgeous over a console in an entryway, particularly on a wall with some soft color.

If you have created art from paper in your home, send me a picture!

Hope you're enjoying the weekend,

Terry's Formal Art Wall

After what turned out to be a months-long process, I finally got this art wall hung last week, and I'm thrilled to share the results! (I couldn't post the pictures right away because it was a surprise for the homeowner, my mom, and I didn't want her to see photos before she saw the wall in her house.)

My parents' house is big and open and airy, and the wall in question is the second level hallway, overlooking the foyer, which has double-height ceilings. It is a big wall, making it both an opportunity and a challenge as far as a gallery goes, especially since the vantage point for seeing it is sort of awkward: you encounter it as a whole coming up the stairs, but when you are actually IN the hallway you are too close to the wall to see it as a whole. Here's the before (with the final work lying on the floor--oops):


We set the scheme based on a group of 5 etchings, already framed in gold, by early 20th century artists, which were mostly in storage or hung individually elsewhere in the house. The idea was to make a strong impact through a tight arrangement of gold frames, which you would see coming up the stairs, followed by the more intimate experience of seeing these delicate works up close, one by one.

To accomplish this, we gathered a number of other black and white works with delicate lines, but we needed to do some serious frame makeovers.

Check out the line drawing of the Madonna, framed in gold with a green velvet border. And that pair of Chinese etchings in skimpy little nothing frames.


The drawing of the Virgin belonged to my dad's mother, and we did her up right in a graceful frame and gold fillet, and gave the Chinese pieces much more oomph with a heavier gold bamboo frame. To go with the old-world feel of the original pieces, all the new frames got ivory silk mattes.

Finally, we broke up all the works-on-paper with portraits of my grandparents. My mom had wallet-sized photographs, so we needed to have them reproduced. I stumbled upon a place in Stillwater that specializes in antique photographs, and they did a great job with these (though it took FOREVER). You can see the pictures of my grandfather above and my grandmother, below, post reproduction and framing. I am generally a fan of mixing in the personal when doing a gallery wall in your own home, and think these photos were a great addition here.


To get the formal effect we were after, we figured out the best overall layout, which is very symmetrical, and then decided on completely even spacing between the pictures--2 inches all around. This meant that my usual method of hanging a wall wasn't really necessary: we simply had to figure out the overall placement of the arrangement, hang the center picture, then do a lot of math to hang the rest.

For placement, we taped together two sheets of kraft paper in the overall dimension of the arrangement, and used putty to put the whole thing on the wall. (Thankfully, my aunt was helping me, because that was one BIG sheet of paper, and it did NOT want to stay up on the wall!). Once it was set and the middle picture hung, we simply had to calculate the position of each subsequent nail, the details of which are super boring (but also kind of impressive) and took us forever to figure out, so I will not (further) bore you here.

Anyway, I think the results are truly spectacular (too much? Okay, well, it's real pretty), and my mom was sooooo pleasantly surprised when she came home from two weeks in Arizona to find this long-empty wall DONE.

Here's the same vantage point as the before shot:

And here's a closer look. Or two.


The whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts, and I'm loving it.


Have a boring wall? Want to make it beautiful? I'd love to help. Email me at heatherjoypeterson[at]gmail[dot]com for services and rates.